Climate Change and Migration: A Gravity Model Approach

In this paper climate change is analysed as one of the reasons that push people to migrate. Climate change shows through four main channels: temperature change, precipitation change, sea level rise and extreme events. All these channels are considered together by adding anomalies in temperature and precipitation and the number of people affected by natural disasters to a gravity model of migration, where the bilateral migration flow between 182 countries of the world is the unit of analysis. The empirical tests demonstrate a statistically significant relation between migration and climate change, however while anomalies in temperature and precipitation have a positive impact, the effect of extreme events is ambiguous.